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The Use of Mixed Material.
. We have seen how all of the four types of paragraph may use homogeneous material. Para¬graphs which use material of one kind occur less frequently in conversation and informal writing than those composed of mixed material. The fol¬lowing paragraphs are examples of Types II. and III. made up of miscellaneous subject-matter ; such as, definitions and examples. The hills are great sponges that do not and cannot hold the water that is precipitated upon them, but that let it filter through at the bottom. This is the way the sea has robbed the earth of its various salts, its potash, its lime, its magnesia, and many other mineral elements. It is found that the oldest upheavals, those sections of the country that have been longest exposed to the leeching and washing of the rains, are poorest -in those substances that go to the making of the osseous frame¬work of man and of the animals. Wheat-does not grow well there, and the men born and reared there are apt to have brittle bones. An important part of those men went down stream, ages before they were born. The water of such sections is now soft and free from mineral substances, but not more wholesome on that account. — JOHN BURROUGHS, Pepacton. The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing game ; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that than at foot¬ball, or any other roughest sport ; and it is abso¬lutely without purpose ; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a great money¬maker what he wants to do with his money — he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. "What *will you make of what you have got ? " you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other people is the game. —JOHN RUSKIN, The Crown of Wild Olive. A brogue is not a fault. It is a beauty, an heirloom, a distinction. A local accent is like a landed inherit¬ance; it marks a man's place in the world, tells where he comes from. Of course it is possible to have too much of it. A man does not' need to carry the soil of his whole farm around with him on his boots. But, within limits, the accent of a native region is delight¬ful. 'T is the flavor of 'heather in the grouse, the taste of wild herbs and evergreen buds in the venison. I like the maple-sugar tang of the Vermonter's sharp-edged speech ; the round, full-waisted r's of Pennsylvania and Ohio ; the soft, indolent vowels of the South. One of the best talkers now living is a schoolmaster from Virginia, Colonel Gordon McCabe. I once crossed the ocean with him on a stream of stories that reached from Liverpool to New York. He did not talk in the least like a book. He talked like a Virginian. -HENRY VAN DYKE, Fisherman's Luck._